Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Ambiguous Democracy and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23:2 (1997), 79-96.
Stavrakakis tackles the age-old divide in democratic theory between: individuality and commonality. But try as they might, those who try to impose harmony, an ethics of harmony no doubt, run up against the wall of contingency, the disharmony of democratic arrangements. Instead of trying to resolve this discordance with ‘better ethics’ or a more precise and workable democratic theory that seeks to contain the contingent through various attempts to enforce more ‘inclusive protocols’ for example, Stav argues that all this is for not.
The argument of Stavrakakis is:
This gap that exists between the plural, the multiple, the particular and their opposite, the general, the Good, the common value etc, reveal a gap, a non-closure that can never be resolved permanently. Stav celebrates this ambiguity as the strength of democracy which ensures that this opening is constantly renewed and changeable via elections etc. Those who are unnerved by the essential contingency that is this gap, try to close it and thus make un-democratic the very democracy they are trying to build. However this leads to the following point, “instead of harmony we are meant to legitimize disharmony and recognize division.” (84) Or what Connelly calls in his book an “ethics of disharmony.” But then what is this new ethics about? Here then is where Stav turns to Lacan. The history of Western philosophy has been a “doomed quest for harmony based on successive conceptions of the good” (85).
The clear aim of all these attempts is to reinstate the big Other, the symbolic system, the field of the social as a harmonious unified whole by referring it to a single positive principle. The same applies to the subject … [who] can be harmonized by being subjected to the ethical law. It is evident that an ethical view based on the fantasy of harmony applied both to the subject and to the social is not compatible with democracy, rather it can only reinforce ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fragmentation.’ (85)
🙂 Žižek rejects this either/or. Either democracy that recognizes itself as radically incomplete project or else totalitarianism, is for Žižek a sign of an inability to note that the very terrain that Stavrakakis occupies is misrepresenting the way in which political change comes about not by incremental changes to the coordinates of the symbolic which is the project of Stavrakakis as understood by Žižek, but instead through a radical political act. Žižek also claims that the Real is not this “ambiguity in democratic politics” but the Real of capital [whatever that means.]
Further excepts from the article by Stavrakakis:
Society does not exist. Gone are the markers of certainty that ensured the position of the prince was a ‘god-given’ right guaranteed in religious edict. It is the recognition of “division and antagonism and the dissolution of ‘pre-democratic’ unconditional points of reference that institute a deep ambiguity in the heart of democracy; but this is not an accident, it is the differentia specifica of democracy: Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution fo the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy …” (81)
… the ambiguity of democracy is not an ambiguity caused by democracy. The ambiguity, the division, the dislocation of organic social unity precede the democratic invention. Democracy does not produce by itself the ambiguity and the lack characterizing the human condition; it does not produce the irreducible division and disharmony characterizing every social form. It only attempts to come to terms with them by recognizing them in their irreducibility, thus producing a new form of social unity (82).
… traditional ethics aims at mastering this structural impossibility of the Real. It’s failure opens the road to a different strategy, that of recognizing the centrality and irreducibiity of the Real. (86)
Although the Real in itself cannot be touched there are two strategies in confronting its structural causality. The first one is to bypass it — as traditional ethical discourse does — while the second is to encircle it. This latter strategy entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the Real and an attempt to institutionalize social lack. This attitude is what Žižek has called ‘ethics of the Real.’ … The ultimate failure of the successive conceptions of the good cannot be resolved by identifying with a new conception of the good. Our focus must be on the dislocation of these conceptions itself. This is the moment when the Real makes its presence felt and we have to recognize the ethical status of this presence (87).
“Sublimation creates a public space. Although it can only be individual it nevertheless creates a public space, a unifying field” (88). Sublimation “involves another sort of “bond” among us, a bond that mediates between the individual and the common, the particular and the universal.” (88)
The work of art is, on the one hand, strictly individual; tied to the libido of a particular body, the artist. But the artist’s work is also addressed to the public, creating a public space without ever abolishing its singularity: ‘the public of sublimation is not, in this sense, a public of common denominator, of communality. Sublimation is rather the public space in which our singular perverse bodies may make contact with one another through the creation of beautiful objects that stand for them. (88)